Back to the New: New Museum Hires Johanna Burton as Director and Curator of Education

This summer, Eungie Joo announced she was stepping down as director and curator of education and public programs at the New Museum to become director of art and cultural programs at Inhotim, mining baron Bernardo Paz’s contemporary art Shangri-La in southeast Brazil. The New Museum has picked the curator and academic Johanna Burton to take her place.

Ms. Burton currently serves as the director of the graduate program at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, the contemporary art proving ground in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., a position she has held since 2010.

The new position marks a return to the New Museum for Ms. Burton, who co-curated an exhibition of Sherrie Levine’s work at the Whitney Museum last year and has written essays and edited books on artists like Cindy Sherman, Mel Bochner and Marilyn Minter. She previously served as a curatorial fellow at the museum in 2002, the year it announced plans to move from its Soho location to a new home on the Bowery.

“It is a great pleasure to welcome Johanna back to our team,” the New Museum’s director, Lisa Phillips, said in a statement released to Gallerist. “She is an incisive thinker and is deeply committed to education, to developing networks of people and ideas, and to expanding scholarship in contemporary art.”

Ms. Burton said in a statement, “The [New Museum’s] history of risk-taking and experiment, and its dedication to such endeavors in the future makes it unique—and pivotal—in the realm of art and culture.”

Before starting at Bard in 2010, she spent two years as associate director and senior faculty member at the Whitney Independent Study Program. Her stint at CCS Bard culminated with an ambitious group show, “Anti-Establishment,” that opened at CCS Bard’s Hessel Museum in June and runs through Dec. 21.

Ms. Burton’s role at the New Museum will be wide-ranging, encompassing the programming for the museum’s fifth-floor education space, its roster of educational programs, the events—from performances to panels—that take place regularly in its theater and its Museum as Hub program, which facilitates collaboration with other institutions around the world.

She won’t be completely severing her ties with CCS Bard. She’ll remain a member of its graduate committee and finish up curatorial and publishing projects already underway. In 2014, Los Angeles’s Hammer Museum will open an exhibition about institutional critique and appropriation that Ms. Burton is co-curating with the Hammer’s Anne Ellegood.